The Eagle Has Landed
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| 1976 UK second edition paperback | |
| Author | Jack Higgins |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | War, Thriller Novel |
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
| Released | 8 September 1975 |
| Media Type | Print (Hardback and Paperback) |
| Pages | 352 pp (hardcover edition)) 356 pp (paperback edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-00-221208-0 (hardcover edition) ISBN 0-671-01934-1 (paperback edition) |
| The Eagle has Landed | |
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| Directed by | John Sturges |
| Produced by | David Niven Jnr Jack Wiener |
| Written by | Jack Higgins (novel) Tom Mankiewicz |
| Starring | Michael Caine Donald Sutherland Robert Duvall Jenny Agutter Donald Pleasence Anthony Quayle Larry Hagman Treat Williams |
| Distributed by | ITC |
| Release date(s) | 1976 |
| Running time | 135 m (UK) 123 m (U.S.) 145 m (extended version) |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $6,000,000 |
| IMDb profile | |
The Eagle Has Landed is a book by Jack Higgins first published in 1975. It was made into a film in 1976. The plot has some similarities with that of Went the Day Well?
The book is still in print, being reissued in New York by Berkley Books in 2000 with ISBN 0-425-17718-1
The 1976 film version was directed by John Sturges and starred Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland and Robert Duvall.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
Inspired by the brilliant (real life) rescue of Hitler's ally Benito Mussolini by Otto Skorzeny, a similar idea is considered by Hitler, with the strong support of Himmler. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (Anthony Quayle), head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), is ordered to make a feasibility study of the seemingly impossible task of capturing Prime Minister Winston Churchill and returning him to the Reich.
Canaris considers the idea a joke, but realizes that although Hitler will soon forget the matter, Himmler will not. Fearing Himmler may try to discredit him, Canaris orders one of his officers, Oberst Radl (Duvall) to undertake the study, despite feeling that it is all just a waste of time.
An Unteroffizier on Radl's staff finds that one of their spies, code named Starling, has provided a tantalizing piece of intelligence. "At any other time, in any other place, this information would be useless", Radl said. "And then synchronicity rears its ugly head." Winston Churchill is scheduled to visit an airfield near the village of Studley Constable, where Joanna Grey, a South African woman and German spy, lives. Radl comes up with a scheme that could work. Himmler meets secretly with Radl and unofficially tells him to proceed, without notifying Canaris. An agent, a member of the IRA named Liam Devlin (Sutherland), is dispatched to contact Mrs. Grey.
Radl recruits a team of commandos to carry out the operation, commanded by a German Fallschirmjäger officer, Oberst Kurt Steiner (Caine). While returning from the Eastern Front, Steiner intervened when SS soldiers rounded up Jews at a railway station in Poland, and attempted to save the life of a teenage girl who was shot while trying to escape. For this, he was court-martialled, along with a platoon of his men. Rather than the firing squad, the men were allowed to transfer to a punishment unit in the Channel Islands, where they made suicidal attacks with manned torpedoes against British channel convoys.
Radl travels to Guernsey and, with the help of Devlin, recruits Steiner and his surviving men. The team will fly into the UK in a captured C-47 with Allied markings. The commandos outfit themselves as Polish troops, as few of them speak English, and plan to infiltrate Studley Constable, complete their mission, rendezvous with an E-boat on the nearby coast and make their escape.
The film lacks many details of the novel, including the detention of Kurt Steiner's father, General Steiner, by the Gestapo as additional incentive for Oberst Steiner. Also, a member of a British SS unit British Free Corps is featured in the novel but absent from the film. Joanna Grey's hatred of the English due to her South African heritage and experiences, however, is made clear in the film version.
The plan is ultimately foiled when a German paratrooper rescues a local girl from a water wheel. He is killed in the process and his German uniform (worn under the Polish uniforms as protection against being executed as spies) revealed to the village people. The locals are rounded up, but the sister of Father Vereker, a local priest, escapes to a base of United States Army Rangers. Inexperienced Colonel Pitt (Larry Hagman) is killed trying to shoot Joanna in her house, while his poorly planned assault on the church fails. Captain Clark (Treat Williams) then organizes a second, successful attack.
In the novel Steiner, his second in command, and Devlin manage to escape with the aid of local girl Molly Prior (Agutter), with whom Devlin had become romantically involved. Instead of taking his chance to escape, Steiner opts to make one last attempt at Churchill. He succeeds in reaching Churchill, but hesitates and is shot and killed.
The novel concludes with the author Higgins supposedly meeting with various surviving characters as he gathers information for the story, the final revelation coming from an aged Father Vereker that 'Churchill' had been an impersonator and even if the mission had succeeded, it wouldn't have mattered.
In the film, Steiner's men choose to sacrifice themselves to delay the Americans whilst Steiner goes after Churchill. In this version there is no hesitation and Steiner appears to kill Churchill before being killed by the security staff. The deception is then revealed immediately- the Prime Minister was actually at the Tehran Conference.
With the failure of the operation, Radl is executed. The failure being the true reason but the pretext is "acting without orders from Canaris". In this way Himmler protects his own back.
[edit] Cast
- Michael Caine .... Obt. Kurt Steiner
- Donald Sutherland .... Liam Devlin
- Robert Duvall .... Obt. Max Radl
- Jenny Agutter .... Molly Prior
- Donald Pleasence .... Heinrich Himmler
- Anthony Quayle .... Adm. Canaris
- Jean Marsh .... Joanna Grey
- Sven-Bertil Taube .... Capt. von Neustadt
- John Standing .... Father Verecker
- Judy Geeson .... Pamela
- Treat Williams .... Capt. Clark
- Larry Hagman .... Col. Pitts
- Tim Barlow .... George Wilde (Publican)
[edit] Filming locations
The majority of the film, set in the fictional village of Studley Constable, was filmed at the village of Mapledurham in Oxfordshire and features the village church, Mapledurham Watermill and Mapledurham House. The sequence set in Alderney was filmed in Charlestown, near St Austell in Cornwall. Some of the filming took place at RAF St. Mawgan, near Newquay, and at Rock, both in Cornwall.
[edit] Trivia
- The phrase "The Eagle has landed" was also used when the Eagle lunar module first landed on the Moon in 1969.
- The book explicitly states that the story is 70% history and 30% fiction. The preface of the book states that the plan to capture Winston Churchill did exist.
- After the success of The Eagle Has Landed, Higgins wrote a quasi-sequel called The Eagle Has Flown.
- The Liam Devlin character seems to be based on the real-life Frank Ryan. Like Devlin in the book, Ryan was an IRA man who had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, was captured by the Franco forces and afterwards passed to the Germans. The real Ryan had not, however, participated in any German commando raid, and his deteriorating health (he died in 1944 in a Dresden hospital) would have made this impossible.
[edit] External links
[edit] Release details
- unknown year, US, Bantam Books ISBN 0-553-02500-7, Publication date ? ? ?, Paperback Edition
| John Sturges | |
|---|---|
| 1940s | The Man Who Dared | Shadowed | Alias Mr. Twilight | For the Love of Rusty | Keeper of the Bees | The Sign of the Ram | Best Man Wins | The Walking Hills |
| 1950s | The Magnificent Yankee | The Capture | Mystery Street | Right Cross | Kind Lady | The People Against O'Hara | It's a Big Country (with Clarence Brown, Don Hartman, Richard Thorpe, Charles Vidor, Don Weis and William A. Wellman) | The Girl in White | Jeopardy | Fast Company | Escape from Fort Bravo | Bad Day at Black Rock | Underwater! | The Scarlet Coat | Backlash | Gunfight at the O.K. Corral | The Law and Jake Wade | The Old Man and the Sea | Last Train from Gun Hill | Never So Few |
| 1960s | The Magnificent Seven | By Love Possessed | Sergeants 3 | A Girl Named Tamiko | The Great Escape | The Satan Bug | The Hallelujah Trail | Hour of the Gun | Ice Station Zebra | Marooned |
| 1970s | Joe Kidd | Chino | McQ | The Eagle Has Landed |
